Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Take a look at the top item on our Intrade quote board, on the lower left margin of this page. (We are an Intrade affiliate.) With just a few days to go, it appears that French voters will decisively reject the EU Constitution. It wouldn’t surprise me.
Lex and I went back and forth on this topic in email. I said, essentially: the sooner the EU fails the better for everyone. Lex responded:
Right. The EU as a free trade zone makes sense. As a single political entity it makes no sense. They need to rethink what they really want and need to do collectively. This current proposed “Constitution” is a farce. Look at it.
Here [pdf file]
It’s an atrocity. It is over 200 pages long. That is not a Constitution. That is not even a statute. It is a regulatory code. It is too long even for that. Lunacy.
About 18 pages.
Right.
According to this news item, the big issue at Cannes this year is how 70% of all European movie ticket sales are to American films.
If you read the item you’ll see that there’s a great deal of both confusion and emotion involved. The French are so upset that they’re claiming that any picture funded by American studios is a US movie, and so ineligible to compete in French film festivals. This includes the Harry Potter films, movies that have nothing to do with America except that dollars were used to produce it.
It’s understandable that the Europeans are interested in this issue. American culture, particularly US popular culture, is incredibly appealing. The appeal seems to cross many cultural lines, something that is very puzzling to the cultural elites in Europe.
The French will soon hold a referendum on the European constitution. Polls, which are usually less reliable than futures markets, show that NON vote is ahead of OUI vote.
I was interested if there is a betting market on this vote which I think is more important in its impact on the world than the election in Britain. I checked Intrade and couldn’t find anything. Is anyone aware of any other markets?
Yet another good article, reviewing yet another book which “discovers” that French culture has a deeply rooted animosity against the United States. (Via Arts and Letters Daily). The book, The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism, by Phillipe Roger, sounds like a solid, scholarly treatment of this topic. Of course, popular works on this theme have abounded recently.
Roger started out researching right wing French anti-Americanism in the 1930s: ”I started working on a small piece … I didn’t realize at all that I had to go back two centuries.” This should come as no surprise. In fact, even a scholarly treatment of French anti-Americanism that — correctly — projects it back as far as the 18th Century misses a large part of the story. First, French anti-Americanism is just the most recent chapter in one of the oldest rivalries in the world — the struggle between France and England, which continued on into a struggle between France and the British Empire, and continues today in a continual state of animosity between France and the daughter polities of that Empire, most importantly the United States, which we are coming to think of as the Anglosphere.
So, this story can be projected back far further than two centuries. I had an earlier post on this topic called “The French Have Always Been Like That”, which focused on a review essay by Walter Russell Mead called “Why Do They Hate Us? Two Books Take Aim at French Anti-Americanism”. Mead pointed out that
Both in France and beyond, new anti-Americanism is simply old Anglophobia writ large. Anti-Anglo-Saxonism has been a key intellectual and cultural force in European history since the English replaced the Dutch as the leading Protestant, capitalist, liberal, and maritime power in the late seventeenth century.
The Mead quote also points out another important fact, French anti-Americanism is merely European anti-Americanism at its most intense. James Ceasar in his Reconstructing America : The Symbol of America in Modern Thought takes up this theme. (He had a short version of this argument in The Public Interest (You have to go to “Previous Issues”, then to the Summer 2003 issue.)
When the smoke cleared at the end of the Cold War we did not behold a new world. Instead, we saw that Western unity had been an unusually strong during the Cold War, due to a perceived shared danger. But with that danger gone much remained as it had always been. The Soviet threat highlighted the historical unity of the West. This unity is real. However, within that unity there have always been many rivalries and animosities. With the advent of more or less democratic government throughout Europe and the development of nuclear weapons, the possibility of any shooting war between these countries and any Anglosphere country is off the table. Nonetheless, other means of opposition and confrontation short of open, armed conflict are available. The two communities have different values and see the world in different ways. The conflict between the continental European states, especially France, the European state par excellence, and the offshore opponent, England, is a fundamental, structural element of world politics. It is not a problem with a solution. It is a permanent feature which needs to be considered and worked around in all dealings between Britain and Europe, or America and Europe, or the Anglosphere generally and Europe.
The surprising thing is that people continue to be surprised by this.